Page 9 of Trading Up
I closed my eyes, tears still falling. Did I mess this up? When did I first start feeling this lonely? When did I start to lose myself? When did I start to see Row that way? Did I see him thatway? Was I just looking for comfort? What was going on with me? This had to be some fucked up dream. This couldn’t be real.
“Why did you never like him?” I asked, needing to know where my judgment went wrong.
“He never liked peanut butter and chocolate. Never trust someone who doesn’t think chocolate and peanut butter go together.” He smiled and walked away, off to the couch.
Waking up the next morning, I felt like I was in a fog. It felt like so much of what happened last night was a dream. I was hoping it was a dream. If that was real, I made such an ass out of myself. I got all lost in the wine and my feelings and made myself look like a slut. I buried my head under my pillows, trying to drown out all sunlight and noise. Maybe it was just a super weak moment, when I just clung onto the only warm person in my life.
Walking downstairs, I had almost convinced myself it had been a dream or a hallucination or something, when I smelled something cooking in the kitchen. There, shirtless and oh so sexy looking, cooking in my kitchen, was my best friend, cooking with my children. My Deveraux. Cooking with my sons, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Hold the phone.MyDeveraux?Woah. When had that happened?
A tomato-red blush sprang to my face as the embarrassment hit in full force. I couldn’t stop it as it flamed my cheeks, even deeper when he turned and noticed me standing there like an idiot.
“Was last night…did that really happen? How…it wasn’t…was it?” He nodded.
“Yes, I was most definitely being for real last night,” his face was still frozen, almost like he was afraid of my reaction in the sober, fresh light of day. “I want you and have only ever wanted you. But I thought my chance with you had gone out the window when you married Numb Nuts.”
I stared at him, shocked that he was reconfirming everything he said last night. Since when?
“Since you stopped me from destroying the kitchen at work in college.” His eyes were honest as always. Since then?!
Since college?!
S E V E N: Petty at its finest.
Sarah’s POV
Three months.
Three long, agonizing, annoying months of continuing to live with the cheating prick who was still as cluelesstoday, that I knew about him and his whore, as he was when I found out three months ago that he’d been cheating on me. After somelightcyber stalking, only every day for three weeks, I’d blocked their joint social media account, so I wasn’t tempted to look at it anymore. It wasn’t worth my mental health.
I got the kids into family therapy to help with the transition of us being a family of three instead of a family of four. I wanted to get ahead of any uncomfortable conversations I knew I was going to have to have with them at some point. I stepped up my own therapy, working with her and filling her in on my impending divorce. I was going once a week, and the boys were going once every other week.
My therapist said she would be happy to write a letter to the courts about my work and progress in therapy if needed. She also helped me talk through my ideas for going back to work. I wanted to start a professional cleaning and organization company, catering towards new moms, or moms of multiple children, who needed the help fitting a new addition into the family without feeling overwhelmed. Prices wouldn’t be too high, I’d barely make a profit, but it would be good work that would help the community. This business would be something that would help calm something inside of me that needed soothing. Like a wound that opened that I hadn’t realized needed healing. Like there was something that fractured insideof me, that needed repairing, fixing, something that wasn’t physical.
How do you fix that? How do you cope with being a single parent while married? The only one to tend to everything in the house, even before kids? How do you cope with being the only person who was grasping at straws to keep a marriage from falling apart while keeping a household together? How? The reality of all of what I thought I was working to keep together, to build, was all a lie…it cut deep. Soul fracturing deep.
I had also talked to my therapist about the app, and how I wanted to set it up so that women everywhere could download it and be linked to therapists, Mom/Parent groups in their communities, along with help hotlines they can call when they feel like it’s too much. I had initially only wanted to market toward single mothers, because I could resonate with being one while married. But she suggested that I expand my thinking. She suggested that a man, who hadn’t fully comprehended during those nine months that he could have the potential to be a single father, might need a group to help him so he didn’t flounder too badly.
She helped get me in contact with some people who could help from the local college, my alma mater. Returning to campus to meet with professors and students alike felt so natural, almost second nature, that it was refreshing that I could still interact with other adults after being tucked away with children for years. I was excited to start working with them and start being around more people. It was like a fire was lit under my ass, and I couldn’t take a single step backward. Forwards was the only way I knew to move now. I looked into daycare costs once school let out for summer. I had to make a mental note to figure daycare costs into the divorce.
Things at home were pretty much the same, with Will clueless to my indifference. In the first six weeks, he had no ideathat I was purposely doing things to keep the boys and myself out of the house. We were going to the park almost every day when he was supposed to be off work. We walked through town to the little ice cream shop. It let the boys get some energy out, and it was good, fresh air around the time that the boys needed to start settling down for bedtime. He didn’t notice that there were no leftovers for him like there used to be.
He didn’t notice that I had stopped doing anything for him. I did mine and the boys' laundry, but I never did his. The two times he asked about it, I told him that it wasn’t in the laundry room when I did mine and the boys. The next time I went to do laundry, his was in there, waiting for me, and a few things may or may not have shrunk. New things. Things I knew I hadn’t bought for him, and that I knew he’d never buy for himself. I was having the boys help me around the house more. He yelled at me for shrinking his new things, and I apologized, claiming I was overwhelmed and the boys must have accidentally put those items in the dryer, trying to be helpful. It seemed plausible, so he bought it. As of yesterday, he hadn’t even noticed it had been twelve weeks since we’d talked about anything but the boys.
During those three months, I let the anger out in petty ways. Not just the only talking to him about the boys andaccidentallyshrinking his clothes. There was one time I went grocery shopping and got an extra half-gallon of milk that somehow ended up in his car’s trunk, which he didn’t find for almost a month in the mid-July heat. There were a few nights where I got into his phone, collecting more screenshots, but also deleting dinner dates, or important dates to remember for his mistress, and meetings with family and friends he hadn’t told me about because he was takingher.
I also decided one day, while the boys were at school, that I would sign him up for a couple of things. Since hedidn’t honor the sacred marriage vows we took, I felt he needed religion, so I asked for pamphlets, monthly newsletters, and visits from any of the good brothers and sisters of every religion, from Scientology and Jehovah’s Witnesses to Catholicism. And I figured, while I was at it, signed him up for AARP, information on erectile dysfunction, and anything else I could subscribe him to, with his credit card, from his home computer. Including but not limited to health insurance quotes for the business, us individually, car insurance quotes, some very risqué porn sites, magazines, and product tester for ‘the other team’ he did not bat for. I selectednodiscrete packaging, because he should be proud of how much he gets around. No need to hide it now that I know about it.
Row and I were talking one night, and I was telling him about all of the petty things I’d done thus far when he suggested we talk to his friend from the Health Department about sending a fact letter letting him know about his horrific, incurable STD that he’d have to notify them and any sexual partners about. His friend wouldn’t send it for us, but he gave us the gist of the language that they typically used for those kinds of letters.
The day he got the letter was a Saturday. On a rare Saturday, he was home, and upon reading it, I watched his face pale. It was delivered mid-morning, and we had just finished breakfast, and I had gotten the boys ready to go to the zoo with my mom group, when he came into our room. His face was confused at first, staring at the envelope, and even when he started reading the letter. Then, about two minutes after he started reading, his face paled considerably. It was glorious to watch in real time, and it gave me such a sense of satisfaction. I knew I shouldn’t be finding his horror as delicious as I was. I knew that it was petty of me to do these sorts of things, but I felt he needed a bit of fucking with for what he’d been doing to me for two years.
I was sitting on the bed in a towel, fresh out of the shower. I was ready for a cute but comfortable outfit, having already used the blow dryer on my hair and done my makeup. I knew I was looking good; he just hadn’t seen how good in months, maybe more than a year. But today was going to be the start of that change. I was going to look like I was dressed and ready to go on a date every day, even for simple errands to the grocery store or to pick the boys up from school.
“Something wrong? You look sick, Will.” I tried to keep my tone light, and worried, though it was getting harder and harder to worry about this prick and anything to do with him.
“N-no,” he stuttered, leafing through the paperwork, “Everything’s fine. Just some work stuff,” he muttered, pulling his phone out and typing away furiously on it. No doubt getting ready to text the whore about his STD. He won’t be able to be with her intimately while she’s pregnant, unless they want to risk harming the fetus. Cue the internal eye roll. Of course, he’s more worried about her getting it than me. I sat there, snipping the tags off the new lingerie I bought myself two days ago. By the third snip from my tiny little sewing scissors, he looked at me again, still pale.
“When did you buy new lingerie?” I looked up, seeing him with his eyes on me, confused.
